Kigali

We took a trip to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, this past weekend. This will be a lengthy, and perhaps disjointed, post. I experienced a full range of emotions that will be difficult to describe succinctly and logically; there were moments of hilarity, juxtaposed against moments of deep sadness, often within hours of each other. It is best to proceed chronologically.

Friday Afternoon: 

After finishing class and eating a bland lunch, we proceeded to the bus depot to catch a bus. Honestly, a big part of our motivation to go to Kigali was simply to gorge on different kinds of food, as the local kitchens only provided tepid variations of beans and rice. I was already looking forward to finding some good Indian food.

The bus depot was a steaming mess of cars, cargo, and salesmen. We somehow managed to get onto the very back of a van, and became prepared to sit in a tight knee-to-knee position for the next 3 hours.

After the van was filled beyond its natural (maybe even legal) capacity, we set off down the muddy road at 150 km/ hour. Before long, we could actually smell burnt tire as the van whizzed through the Rwandan countryside.

After about an hour, we encountered an accident ahead of us and slowed to a stop. Policemen with AK-47's seemed to be facilitating some kind of emergency rescue. Our driver, ever the daredevil, grew frustrated with the slow pace of the rescue and decided to drive into on-coming traffic to get past the accident.

He then promptly accelerated back to 150 km/ hour.

Friday Evening:

We arrived in Kigali about an hour before schedule. The city is incredibly clean and developed. It actually looks like a Greek island I visited back in 2008 (see picture).

After finding our bearings and stretching our legs, we checked into the Discover Rwanda Youth Hostel near the centre of the city. The hostel had an upstairs patio with a fantastic view of the city (see picture). Fellow travellers from the US, the UK, and Australia were enjoying the view while puffing on cigarettes and sipping imported beer.





We set out for dinner at Khaana Khazana, which literally means "food treasure" or the "treasure of food" in Hindi. Oh, and what a gem of a restaurant it was. I ate hot naan and paneer like a glutton, washing the glorious food down with mango lassi. In my mind, the meal alone justified the entire trip.



Saturday Morning:

When I told my friends that I would be travelling to Rwanda this summer, their immediate reaction was one of concern and fear. This is understandable: 20 years ago, Rwanda experienced one of the worst genocides in human history. We went to the Genocide Memorial in Kigali on Saturday morning. The Memorial was commemorating the 20th anniversary of the genocide, and the flowers were placed on the graves of over 250,000 Rwandans.



The Memorial itself was split into 3 main sections: pre-genocide, genocide, and post-genocide. The division between Hutu and Tutsi was actually implemented by the Belgian colonizers. Rwandans who had longer noses and more than 10 cows were called Tutsi's and became the administrative class, ruling over the majority Hutu's. After the Belgians left, a division that was based on the length of one's nose became the fuel for poisonous ethnic hatred and violence.

The genocide was not a spontaneous event - it was the culmination of over 50 years worth of boiling hatred between Tutsi's and Hutu's. And nobody was spared once the killing began. Our guide actually came to Rwanda as a child in 1995 and remembers seeing corpses of men, women, and children on the side of the road.

Given these facts, the recovery has been astounding. It is a real testament to the strength of the human spirit. Brick by brick, Rwanda has rebuilt its institutions and infrastructure to achieve one of the fastest GDP growth rates in Africa, despite being landlocked and having few natural resources. The genocide is not merely a memory here: it serves as a constant reminder to do better.